Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Paid staff vs. volunteers

[Stuart Staniford-Chen (stanifor]

Rob Sandelin writes:

> At Sharingwood we have no requirements for participation and things still 
> get done, albeit very slowly at times.  Some people put in more time than 
> others, in a cycle based on their lives and energy.  For example my wife put 
> in lots of energy as the general contractor for our commonhouse, and found 
> that her home schooling duties required more of her time so that job got 
> handed off to someone else who has the time.

At N St, we had very much the same system, and, like you, we found that
sometimes things happened very slowly.  At our last meeting we consensed
on several proposals which totally threw out the status quo for how we
govern ourselves and get things done.  Now we will have a series of standing
committees or teams for different tasks.  Everyone will be required to be
on one, and they are all supposed to meet monthly except where not appropriate.

We also switched from having two business meetings a month to one, to make
space for all the committee meetings.  Now, folks having things they want
to talk about are supposed to try and resolve it with the committee in 
question before it comes to the large group.

Many of the details of how this will work are undecided, and it's much too
early to tell if it will work less well, about the same, or better than our
previous system.

Stuart.

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Stuart Staniford-Chen                   | Dept of Computer Science
stanifor [at] cs.ucdavis.edu                    |   UC Davis, CA 95616
h:(916) 756-8697; w:(916) 754-8742      |          and
http://seclab.cs.ucdavis.edu/~stanifor/ | N St Cohousing Community
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